hollywood

One of Los Angeles’s great landmarks is the Griffith Observatory, an architectural gem that mixes art-deco and Mayan aesthetics. It’s perched on a ridge in Hollywood Hills above Los Felix and provides a stunning, wide view the L.A. basin. It naturally is a major tourist draw, with thousands upon thousandsContinue Reading

The artist ALEC has made a career of street art and massive murals with images of pop-culture icons and celebrities from New York City to far-flung corners like Bali, Indonesia. It’s fitting — and perhaps inevitable — that in the heart of Hollywood he would paint a mural of legendaryContinue Reading

Maximalist German publisher Taschen, producer of epic coffee-table books devoted to all things art and design, has recently given its Los Angeles gallery a wholesale pink makeover. It’s part of the company’s promotion of its new book celebrating the work and career of L.A.-based British artist David Hockney. The gallery isContinue Reading

A classic example of Los Angeles movie-theater architecture from the early days of cinema, the Vista on Sunset Boulevard in Los Feliz is a landmark. Built in 1923, it has been a part of the LA urban landscape for nearly a century, from the silent-film era through to the recentContinue Reading

When the late legendary actress Elizabeth Taylor appeared in the 1963 film classic “Cleopatra” in 1963, she unlikely never imagined that her likeness would appear as street art on a now hip stretch of Faifax Avenue in Hollywood. But so it is. Film immortalizes. Street art, though usually ephemeral, hasContinue Reading

We never tire of revisiting this minimalist masterpiece by artist Robert Irwin at LACMA in Los Angeles. The colorful installation of fluorescent lights has a permanent home in a large ground-floor gallery at LACMA’s Broad Contemporary building. The title of the artwork is “Miracle Mile” and it is specific toContinue Reading

This cheeky mural on the side of liquor store on Normandie Avenue in Hollywood depicts current U.S. President Barack Obama fencing. Unfortunately the camera angle wasn’t wide enough to show his fencing opponent on the left, Russian President Vladimir Putin. The idea of Obama and Putin physically battling each other asContinue Reading

On a recent visit to the sprawling, campus-like Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), we revisited one of the prized possessions of its permanent collection, a massive painting by British artist David Hockney. “Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio” is a quintessential L.A. painting. The image is an impressionisticContinue Reading

Real-Estate developer, New York City fixture, celebrity, reality TV show star, and politician, Donald Trump is at the center of U.S. media coverage these days while he campaigns to win the Republican nomination as its candidate for the American presidency. A polarizing, attention-hungry personality and demagogic political figure, Trump’s controversial views and bombast has inContinue Reading

The late Paris-based Venezuelan artist Jesus Raphael Soto made a career of painting, sculpture and optical and kinetic art. It was the last of these for which he’s perhaps best known, such as this interactive, immersive “Penetrable” installed in the plaza in front of the Ahmanson building at the sprawlingContinue Reading